Through the hole of a shell: attuning to movements and disturbances across time through walking-with an intertidal zone

This text explores the porous relationship between movement and walking in place-based artistic research. Drawing upon thinking from contemporary art, research-creation, Indigenous studies, and the environmental humanities, walking as a situated artistic practice is engaged as a research method that enacts a porous attunement to movements and disturbances within place. Recounting walking experiences along Belongil Beach, within the Arakwal coastline in the Northern Rivers region of New South Wales, Australia, the author examines how encounters with phenomena during these walks may be reconfigured through sculptural experiments, revealing things previously masked by the tide, buried in the dunes or overlooked. The site-responsive artistic engagements examined reveal an interplay between absence and presence, highlighting fraught tensions between human and nonhuman bodies, colonial legacies, histories of mineral extraction, property and weathering within the beach. In an era marked by rising sea levels and ecological crisis, attuning to movements through walking within the intertidal zone of the beach paves the way for artistic responses that emerge from within the tensions of place, embodying the material-ethical conditions of an ever-shifting coastline.